4 Marketing Channels You Must Invest In

No matter how large or small a business is, the following four marketing channels are must-haves for increasing brand awareness, growing product interest, and enhancing your online presence.

Your Website: A corporate website should be your business’s first priority for establishing a strong marketing effort. Strong websites have the ability to promote all of your products and services, collect data from inquiries and leads, and help enhance your search engine optimization. Online searches are the primary way for people to find any type of business these days – make sure their first impression of your business is a positive one!

Email: Whether your business is B2B or B2C, this channel is a must-have because people use their email every day, for both personal and business reasons. You can use it to announce new products, cross-promote services, and for follow-up campaigns from previous events. Email is a great way to stay in front of your audience, increase product awareness, and drive traffic to your website.

Mobile: In case you didn’t notice, mobile devices are kind of a big deal right now and they aren’t going away. Businesses of all kinds need to review their website from mobile phones, tablets, laptops – you name it! If the user experience of your website is not mobile-optimized, you are losing your mobile audience.

Social Media: There are many benefits of social media marketing for businesses. These channels are great for staying in front of your audience’s eyes on a daily basis, driving traffic to your website, and finding new audiences. Social media channels also tend to rank higher in search engine results because they are updated so frequently.

Each one of these marketing channels are essential for broadcasting your business’s capabilities to your audience.

What other marketing channels does your company invest a lot of its time into? I’d love to hear below!

9 thoughts on “4 Marketing Channels You Must Invest In”

I agree with Patrick – Personalized Print. The other point is these channels are worthless if you don’t have the ability to connect on a micro page and start a dialogue about what is important to each visitor.

In addition to building critical data on each prospect, you ca provide high-value downloadable content, connect to product and informational videos, links to white papers and studies, and many other high value informational content.

By doing this you start to build the education, trust and awareness of why you are a great potential solution for the visitor.

Finally, using these channels without an overall integrated marketing strategy for your marketing program just creates lots of silo data that has little value in the long run.

Just my $.02 cents form what I see for companies of all sizes across the globe, including B2B and B2C.

John has created a thoughtful list, and I agree that when used together, each of these channels will create a powerful impact.

In addition to thinking about what channels you are using, companies also need to think seriously what the messages they are communicating in those channels.

I’ve worked with companies who say “We need to be on twitter.” Great, but the real question for Twitter – and for all of the channels John mentions – is how do you want to use these channels to support your business? You then need to develop content for each of these channels to support those goals.

It’s the combination of content and channels that will make companies successful.

Thanks for your thoughtful responses. The simple answer is that we’re all right! Note that I didn’t say these were the only 4, they were just 4 of many that I wanted to point out. Print and direct mail are fantastic digital drivers. We have to build a comprehensive marketing strategy that encompasses many online and offline marketing channels. Online drives traffic offline (i.e. – ordering a book), and offline drives traffic online (i.e. – a direct mail campaign to a digital campaign with a pURL or gURL).

My take away from John’s article is that while most of realize these four (plus Print) are critical so many of our clients still are not doing them. Sometimes you can be a hero simply by executing on the basics. Conduct an audit of your accounts, especially your top prospects, and you will find many have not executed these basic strategies. Recently we did this same audit to our own company and found that we had room for improvement. Thank you John and Patrick.

John- This is a good list and I couldn’t agree more a must have. One thing to add is integration. All of these channels should be talking to each other. Mobile is a huge trend within the markets we service and it integrates very well with social. However, I still see web sites that are not mobile ready and that’s a big no-no. The same goes with email. There are more emails opened with mobile devices than regular desk tops/laptops. Leveraging technology as you very well list it, is key. Good job on the post! Maria

Hey, John … I notice that you said “these four marketing channels are must-haves for increasing brand awareness, growing product interest, and enhancing your online presence.” I saw the emphasis here on increasing, growing, and enhancing. So, while I couldn’t agree more that PRINT belongs in any and ALL integrated marketing programs, there’s an argument to be made that PRINT is often/usually/primarily invested in seeking a $$ result — e.g., an order, a donation, a credit card application, a coupon redemption, etc. Many will argue that PRINT also is better at getting those dollars than any other channel. Having said that, I see where *you’re* coming from. [Right article, wrong audience? ]

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The Digital Nirvana blog provides insight on how evolving marketing and print technologies can fuel opportunities for business growth. Featuring compelling authors, prominent industry analysts and other thought leaders, the blog is a catalyst for a lively exchange of the most current thinking and a variety of viewpoints. The Digital Nirvana is a partnership between WhatTheyThink & Canon Solutions America.